For a VAR with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities, we present posterior densities for several objects that are pertinent for designing and evaluating monetary policy. These include easures of inflation persistence, the natural rate of unemployment, a core rate of inflation, and...

Previous studies have interpreted the rise and fall of US inflation after World War II in terms of the Fed's changing views about the natural rate hypothesis but have left an important question unanswered. Why was the Fed so slow to implement the low-inflation policy recommended by a natural...

This paper shows how to estimate a Bayesian VAR with drifting parameters and nonlinear cross-equation restrictions. The restrictions promote parsimony by reducing the dimension of the drifting component in conditional mean parameters. As an application, the paper investigates an...

The same high labor supply elasticity that characterizes a representative family model with indivisible labor and employment lotteries can also emerge without lotteries when self-insuring individuals choose career lengths. Off corners, the more elastic the earnings profile is to accumulated...

This paper claims that anticipations of a promised massive future government bailout of owners of fallen bank shares suddenly caused a big jump in inflation in Israel in October 1983. That month, the government promised that four or five years later it would compensate innocent people for the...

Without policy reforms, the aging of the U.S. population is likely to increase the burden of the currently unfunded social security and medicare systems. In this paper we build an applied general equilibrium model and incorporate the population projections made by the Social Security...

We apply recursive methods to obtain a finite dimensional and recursive representation of an equilibrium of one of Townsend's models of 'forecasting the forecasts of others'. The equilibrium has the property that decision makers make common forecasts of the hidden state variable whose presence...

Recent papers have analyzed how economies with adaptive agents may converge to and escape from self-confirming equilibria. These papers have imputed to agents a particular prior about drifting coefficients. In the context of a model of monetary policy, this paper analyzes dynamics that govern...

We explore methods for confronting model misspecification in macroeconomics. We construct dynamic equilibria in which private agents and policy makers recognize that models are approximations. We explore two generalizations of reational expectations equilibria. In one of these equilibria,...